1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to the field of digital systems and, more particularly, to arbitration mechanisms for buses within such systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
A bus is frequently used in digital systems to interconnect a variety of devices included in the digital system. Generally, one or more devices are connected to the bus, and use the bus to communicate with other devices connected to the bus. As used herein, the term “agent” refers to a device which is capable of communicating on the bus. The agent may be a requesting agent if the agent is capable of initiating transactions on the bus and may be a responding agent if the agent is capable of responding to a transaction initiated by a requesting agent. A given agent may be capable of being both a requesting agent and a responding agent. Additionally, a “transaction” is a communication on the bus. The transaction may include an address transfer and optionally a data transfer. Transactions may be read transactions (transfers of data from the responding agent to the requesting agent) and write transactions (transfers of data from the requesting agent to the responding agent). Transactions may further include various coherency commands which may or may not involve a transfer of data.
The bus is a shared resource among the agents, and thus a mechanism for determining which agent is permitted to use the bus at any given time is needed. Generally, determining which of several agents is permitted to use the bus (often referred to as “mastering the bus”) is referred to as “arbitration”. An agent desiring to use the bus may signal its request to use the bus, referred to as “arbitrating”. The circuitry for performing arbitration is referred to as an “arbiter”. One or more agents may arbitrate for the bus, and the arbiter determines which of the arbitrating agents is permitted to use the bus. The agent granted use of the bus by the arbiter is referred to as the winner of the arbitration.
Unfortunately, arbitrating for the bus to perform a transfer may add latency to that transfer. For certain low latency agents, the overhead for performing the arbitration may be a significant increase to the latency of the transfer.